Engineer to Olympian: How flexible work helped one employee go for gold

• Key Insight: Learn how tailored flexibility enables firms to recruit and retain niche high-performance talent.
• What's at Stake: Rigid policies risk losing specialized expertise and increasing recruitment costs and operational gaps.
• Supporting Data: Ulteig spans 1,600+ U.S. employees balancing diverse schedules and commitments.
  Source: Bullets generated by AI with editorial review

During the job interview process, it's common for candidates to rattle off some of the commitments they have outside of work: Parenting, volunteering, mentoring, to name a few. 

The winter sport of curling doesn't often come up, but that's exactly what happened when Luc Violette interviewed for an engineering position at Ulteig in spring of 2024. Violette, who started curling competitively at the age of 11 and is a five-time United States Junior Champion, had a big goal in mind for his extracurricular.

"I threw in the Olympics word but said, 'Hey, there's no guarantee,'" said Violette, who was eyeing the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy and wanted his potential employer to know he might need to juggle engineering duties with a busy training schedule if his team qualified 

He got the job and — around a year later — a chance to compete in the Olympics crystallized. After his squad, Team Casper, qualified to represent the United States in Italy, Violette met with his boss and came up with a schedule to balance training with his duties as a structural design engineer.  

Oftentimes that meant picking up odd hours from nontraditional workspaces. "My teammates and I would always joke that we'd take over the hotel lobby," Violette says. 

The St. Paul-based Violette is just one of more than 1,600 Ulteig employees stretched across the U.S., but as far as Chief Human Resources Officer Jim Horn knows, he is the only Olympian. Still, every employee needs some degree of flexibility in their life — whether it's for travel, taking care of their kids, or even to practice sliding heavy stones down the ice. 

Ulteig

"It's all about, who are the most talented people that we can hire," says Horn. "Our job is to give them that glide path to do that." 

Born to curl

For Violette, curling has long been a non-negotiable. His father grew up in northern Minnesota, himself a curler who  competed at some of the highest levels of the sport and in 1992 he was a bronze medalist at the World Men's Championship.The family later moved to the state of Washington, where the young Violette was born. Now 27, he has competed competitively for most of his life, earning accolades along the way: he was a silver medalist at both the 2016 Winter Youth Olympics and the 2017 World Junior Championships.

His day job, however, is also a passion. After graduating from the University of Washington in 2021 with a degree in civil engineering he landed a job with Northwest Construction in Bellevue, Washington, and began the long journey of juggling two things he loved, continuing to compete in curling as he advanced in his engineering career. When he took the job with Ulteig in 2024, he shared a competition schedule with his manager, laying out remote days and PTO ahead of the season.

Michael Woolheater/USA Curling

Once his team secured a spot in the 2026 Olympics, Violette told his manager he would need an entire month off to prepare and compete. He said the support from his colleagues at Ulteig was "phenomenal all the way."

"I had the flexibility to work slightly odd hours throughout the week to make sure I get my hours in," he says. 

No one-size-fits-all approach

Helping people balance their job duties with commitments outside work takes more than flexibility, says CHRO Horn. He likes to use the word "inclusion" when describing the culture at Ulteig.

"It's about creating a place where everyone's welcome because everybody brings a different gig," Horn says. "You've got this whole range of lifestyles and family needs, background and experiences. And at the end of the day, there's no such thing as one-size-fits-all."  

Regardless of the circumstances, making flexible work arrangements successful requires close coordination between an employee and their manager, Horn says. That means staying aligned on hours, managing deadlines, and staying connected when they can't be in the same room.

Ulteig

"The return on investment is there," Horn says. "We're a people business. We don't have a lot of assets. So in a place like ours, if we can't provide that level of support and flexibility, then we're not going to be able to attract and keep the best and brightest. That's really been our secret sauce." 

Violette had all of the support he needed from his company, but the Olympics didn't go as he had hoped. The U.S. men's curling team finished fifth in the round-robin and missed the semifinals, leaving the United States without a medal in the event.

The 2030 Winter Olympics in the French Alps are years away, but Violette is determined to make it back to the world stage for another chance to bring home a medal. The next curling season will start this summer, but for now he's catching up on things he missed while training such as golf, fishing and some of the "extra hours that other co-workers did for me," Luc says. 

"A lot of people like to go on vacation in the winter," he says. "I guess I'm a winter guy."